“It’s known that the PKK works arm in arm with Syria’s intelligence organisation,” said Huseyin Celik, the deputy chairman of Turkey’s AK party. “Assad is inclined to view Turkey’s foe, the PKK, as a friend.”
Officials said the cross-border element to the attacks can be traced to eastern Syrian enclaves where the flags of the PKK and its allies have been hoisted to demonstrate de facto control.
Turkish suspicions of a conspiracy between neighbouring regimes have been fuelled by a simultaneous PKK offensive in the eastern province of Semdinli, which borders Iran.
Turkish newspapers last week reported claims that more than 100 Iranian agents were active in Turkey working on behalf of the PKK.
Meanwhile Syrian regime documents seized by rebels include instructions to resist the advance of Turkish influence.
Towns such as Afrin, west of Aleppo, and Qamishli, to the east, are controlled by the PKK and its local offshoot the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), and are off-limits to Syrian rebels.
Mohammad Haj Hassan, the most prominent Kurdish commander in the rebel movement fighting in Aleppo, told The Daily Telegraph the PKK exerts a strong grip on his fellow Kurds.
“There are no-go places for us because of the PKK’s ties to the regime,” he said. “When the rebellion broke out the PKK was given arms and they fought us. Now they defend the towns they control but don’t let us enter. It is one of the greatest problems for the revolution.”
With a large ethnic Turkish population residing cheek-by-jowl with the Kurds, northern Syria is pockmarked with potential flashpoints.
Hisham Mousa, a Turkmen farmer from the town of Jaqala, said threats from the PKK in Doudian, the next-door village, had forced some of his neighbours to flee.
“We have very little to do with Doudian. They have their ways and we have ours,” he said. “But now they are under the control of the PKK and very threatening to those of us who have joined the revolution.
“Some of the people have gone away because they fear there will be fighting.”
Mr Hassan, a schoolteacher turned warlord, said the PKK’s strong organisation in the area made it difficult for local moderates to stand up against its cadres.
“Assad has been cultivating the PKK since the 1980s to provide just this level of protection for his regime,” he said. “It is a card for Damascus and they are playing it against us and Turkey at the same time.”
Syrian rebels fear their uprising has been exploited by the PKK to ship weapons and explosives across the border. Rebels in Aazaz on the Turkish border said they had set up checkpoints to screen traffic in the days leading up to a car-bomb attack last month in Gaziantep that killed ten. “There was a checkpoint to stop suspicious vehicles just before the attack,” said Abu Amir, a local revolutionary. “However the bomb got through to the city.”
Turkish security analysts believe that by unleashing the PKK, Mr Assad has achieved a tactical victory that makes foreign military intervention on behalf of the rebels less feasible.
“The idea behind this policy is to create an administration that will be fundamentally opposed to Turkish domination of that area, or to act as a buffer zone or deterrent in the case of direct military invasion from Turkey,” said Prof Abbas Vali, at Istanbul’s Bogazici University told Zaman newspaper.
Turkey’s government had begun a tentative peace process with the PKK, whose leader Abdullah Ocalan languishes in solitary confinement in a Turkish prison, before the Syrian crisis erupted.
But with the organisation’s return to full-scale guerrilla attacks, hopes for a settlement that would grant formal autonomy to the country’s 14 million Kurds have been dashed.
“The refugees will one day go home,” said one Turkish official. “But the foreign influence over the PKK means that this problem is here to stay.”
Source: The Telegraph